Seattle Led the Country’s Minimum Wage Revolution. Can It Do the Same With Rent Control?http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/seattle-led-the-charge-on-minimum-wage-can-it-be-a-leader-on-affordable-housing-too
New York and San Francisco both suffer from soaring rents and gentrification, despite decades of regulation. How Seattle socialist Kshama Sawant plans to do affordable housing right.Major cities across the country may soon be finding inspiration from Seattle, the same city that last year sparked the movement for a $15-an-hour minimum wage. The progressive push this time is for what affordable housing proponents see as a necessary antidote to skyrocketing rents, a phenomenon plaguing major cities across the country.

Seattle currently finds itself in the midst of a grand dilemma experienced by other metropolitan cities: How do you maintain growth while simultaneously preserving standards of affordability?

The answer, according to at least one Seattle City Council member, is simple: rent control.

Kshama Sawant, the council member who helped spearhead the adoption of a $15 minimum wage ordinance passed in June 2014, is now calling for the Council to implement a rent control measure she says is critical to Seattle maintaining affordable housing for its residents.

“We aren’t experiencing rent increases in this city. We’re experiencing rents skyrocketing, because landlords are free to engage in price gouging under a system with no rent stabilization,” said Sawant during an interview from her City Hall office.

Sawant said she is not calling for an all-out freeze on rent increases, but instead a ceiling that would prevent rates from soaring skyward, a distinction often lacking in discussions.

Rent control often serves as the Kanye West of city land use policy—championed just as often as derided.

Many local housing affordability activists agree.

“Rent control is about regulating the rent market. Our city council needs to stop abdicating responsibility for affordable housing to private capital,” said Joshua Farris, formerly the executive director of Standing Against Foreclosure and Eviction-Seattle, an anti-homelessness nonprofit.

Farris, who is now running for a City Council seat on the platform of “housing as a human right,” was recently evicted from his home after his landlord nearly doubled his rent in the course of three months.

“People determine the rules by which the market works. It’s not a question of do we need rent control. It’s a question of how strong should our rent control be here,” said Farris.

Sawant said she wants to see a policy where tenants would spend no more than 30 percent of their income on rent, with increases being tied directly to the rate of inflation.

Kshama Sawant. Photo by Alex Garland.

Lessons from San Francisco

Rent control often serves as the Kanye West of city land use policy—championed just as often as derided. Although on the books of more than 200 cities nationwide, it has a record of being somewhat of a mixed bag. The densely populated cities of New York and San Francisco have both suffered from soaring rents and gentrification, despite each employing variations of rent control.

In San Francisco, more than 172,000 of about 381,000 housing units are rent controlled. However, as of last April, tenants could expect to pay an average of $3,458 per month for an apartment—a historic high for the city.

“[Rent] here equates to about $40,000 a year. Which means you have to make at least two to three times that to live somewhat comfortably,” said Scott Weaver, a spokesperson for the San Francisco Tenants Union.

Weaver said that the reason rent control appears to be floundering in San Francisco is because of loopholes in the law that allow landlords to phase out those protections. The most pernicious of these loopholes, according to many affordable housing supporters, is a process known as vacancy decontrol.

Essentially it works as follows: Once a tenant moves out of a rent controlled apartment (or, once that person dies), a landlord is then permitted to raise the rent of the next tenant to whatever the market will allow; the apartment, in effect, is no longer subject to rent control. Weaver joins other tenants-rights activists in pointing to the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act of 1995 as establishing this practice.

“People who say rent control doesn’t work here are uninformed. It just needs to be strengthened,” said Weaver.

When a moderator asked people in a Seattle crowd if they favored rent control, the majority raised their hands. Photo by Alex Garland.

The case of San Francisco can serve as a valuable lesson for Seattle and other municipalities seeking to promote rent control policies, according to Sawant.

“The reason rent control supposedly doesn’t work is that it is being phased out in these other cities,” she said. “You have the real estate and landlord lobbies who have pushed through these various loopholes so as to water down rent control.”

... should a movement emerge from Seattle akin to the $15 minimum wage push, it will span the country.

She compared it to the current state of public education: “We consistently defund public schools, and then turn around and say they don’t work, we need free market solutions such as charter schools. The failure of policy becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Sawant said she is not suggesting a freeze on rent prices, just a method to halt extreme price hikes, ensuring rent increases are small enough to avoid economic evictions while leaving landlords with enough profit to finance maintenance and operations.

Her proposal has attracted a hive of critics who say that rent control will not abate the housing affordability crisis the city faces, pointing to the failure of rent control measures in cities that have experienced an astronomical rise. The proposal would also face several obstacles before being put up for a council vote, as Washington state law currently prohibits such regulation.

But Sawant said she’s convinced that should a movement emerge from Seattle akin to the $15 minimum wage push, it will span the country.

“Struggles and victories, particularly victories that are achieved through organized struggle, are always contagious,” she said. “There’s no doubt that it will happen.”

]]>No publishercommonomicsYTW Feature2015/07/29 00:00:00 GMT-7ArticleRev. Sekou on Today’s Civil Rights Leaders: “I Take My Orders From 23-Year-Old Queer Women”http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/black-lives-matter-s-favorite-minister-reverend-sekou-young-queer
A leading activist pastor speaks about the emerging face of civil rights leadership in 21st century America. For three months, Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou was on the ground in Ferguson, participating in daily protests and leading trainings in nonviolent civil disobedience. That work continues to this day: Sekou was arrested for the third time on Monday, July 13, while protesting the recent police shooting of Brandon Claxton in St. Louis.

The reverend, a St. Louis native, is a writer, filmmaker, organizer, and pastor. He began his ministry at the Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church, where Michael Brown’s funeral was held last August.

“Martin Luther King ain't coming back. Get over it.”

Rev. Sekou’s frank discussions about black America’s fight for racial justice have gained him notoriety across the country.

“Martin Luther King ain’t coming back. Get over it,” said Rev. Sekou during a recent lecture at Warner Pacific College in Portland, Oregon. “It won’t look like the civil rights movement. It’s angry. It’s profane. If you’re more concerned about young people using profanity than about the profane conditions they live in, there’s something wrong with you.”

When we heard that Rev. Sekou would be visiting the Seattle area in early July to keynote a Fellowship of Reconciliation conference, we asked him to visit the YES! office and share his experiences with the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson and Baltimore.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation with Rev. Sekou.

YES!: Tell us about what you experienced during your time with the protests in Ferguson and Baltimore. Who do you see leading the movement?

Sekou: In the last decade, particularly in the age of Obama, the vast majority of the black leadership has been the punditry class—those of us, and I am guilty of this, who are on television, who write books, who give lectures, but don’t necessarily experience on-the-ground direct confrontation with the state.

Now the leadership that is emerging are the folks who have been in the street, who have been tear-gassed. The leadership is black, poor, queer, women. It presents in a different way. It’s a revolutionary aesthetic. It’s black women, queer women, single mothers, poor black boys with records, kids with tattoos on their faces who sag their pants.

These folks embody intersectionality. Particularly in Ferguson, solidarity with Palestine was never a question. More than 250 Palestinians marched with us, and the local Palestinian solidarity committee was with us from day one.

And there is a suspicion of the state. As a result of that suspicion, a lot of folks have turned to cooperative models—talking about buying land, forms of entrepreneurship, a lot of discourse about self-healing—because there is such a disdain and distrust for the state.

YES!: It sounds like people are creating the kind of world they want and not waiting for the state to act. Is that what you’re seeing?

Sekou: It hasn’t even been a year since the events in Ferguson, so we don’t know. And I am not a leader in this movement; I am a follower. I take my orders from 23-year-old queer women.

"I take my orders from 23-year-old queer women."

But when you look at Baltimore, people like Rev. Heber Brown III, the leaders of A Beautiful Struggle, and the leaders of The Algebra Project, they’ve begun looking at how we feed people. In the early days of the Freddie Gray rebellion, we saw one church—Reverend Eric King’s church—feed 2,000 people in one day. There’s been lots of self-care—which is part of the black liberation struggle that has always been about black self-determination, black self-respect, and black dignity.

This also may reflect a recognition that the state will never provide anything for us. Personally, I think the state is going to have to shake some of their resources loose, given the role it has played in the creation of poverty and the way it has maintained a certain form of hegemony over black lives.

YES!: Where do you see opportunity for things to shift in our society? Where could the movement make a real difference?

Sekou: Some say that we need to move from protest to politics, we need to move from protest to power. That’s a false dichotomy.

There are real possibilities in the power of a militant, nonviolent civil disobedience that engages young people and folks who have felt alienated by traditional means of grievance-bearing—whether that be electoral politics, traditional civil rights organizations, or the mammoth nonprofit industrial complex.

If you look at Ferguson or Baltimore, most of the organizations that have emerged are new formations: Millennial Activists United, Hands Up United, Lost Voices, the Don’t Shoot Coalition. They have had no space inside a church, in the NAACP, or in the Urban League.

Paraphrasing Martin Luther King: Social movements set the climate. Elections, public policy, and legislation are thermometers. They measure it. We got two new black city council folks in Ferguson. They are not necessarily radicals, but they are there because of the people who have been in the street. There’s been a fight over a community civilian review board for the police in St. Louis, a 15-year struggle. We just passed it.

I think something has happened that can open a new radical space.

Ferguson is the longest rebellion against state violence in the history of the country. It’s secondary only to the Montgomery bus boycott, and six months longer than the Selma campaign. So that’s what we’re dealing with. And there isn’t one leader. It’s several leaders.

YES!: Why Ferguson? There is police violence against black folks happening all over the country.

Sekou: Well I’m from St. Louis, and even I don’t know.

I think a couple things produced Ferguson. My family began to migrate to St. Louis in 1952 from Arkansas, fleeing the Jim Crow South and the arbitrary violence. A lot of black folks came from Arkansas and Mississippi. The highest number of lynching per capita took place in that part of the country. That’s something in the memory of people who have migrated to St. Louis.

They left Michael Brown’s body in the street for four and a half hours. That’s too much. It was right before school started, and there was a bouncy castle across the street from where he was lying. So there were 5-year-olds saying, “Mike’s laying in the street!”

“Ferguson is the longest rebellion against state violence in the history of the country.”

They brought out police dogs before they brought an ambulance. They tried to put his body in the trunk of a car. The community was like, “You put that body in the trunk of a car and ain’t nobody leaving here alive.” So they put his body in an SUV. That was undignified.

And when young people tried to find answers, they were met with tanks and tear gas. It was too much.

If you look at the history of slave rebellions, a lot of them began after they buried a child. Adult slaves are like, “We can take it, but you can’t do this to our babies.” So I think that’s the difference, the high level of disrespect.

Sekou: We have a romantic view of the church. In Montgomery there are about 100 or so black churches—less than a dozen participated in the bus boycott. In Birmingham, there are upward of 500, and less than a dozen participated in the marches.

I think a church has a role to play, but this idea of the Church, with a big C, I think is obsolete. The young people in the street disturb our religious respectability and sensibility. Queer woman, single moms, pants sagging, tattoos—it disrupts the very character that the church presents to the world. I’m not terribly hopeful for the church. I think queer, black, poor women are the church’s salvation. They don’t need to get saved. The church needs to get saved.

YES!: I saw a brilliant story yesterday about a young African American Lutheran minister in a predominantly white church. After Charleston, she expected the service people to talk about the shooting. They didn’t. Nobody mentioned it. She said it was an epiphany for her about her place in that space and the indifference of this almost all-white church.

Sekou: Martin Luther King has this famous statement that the most segregated hour in the country is on Sunday morning. That segregation comes out of the fact that, first, black folks were not allowed to worship with white folks. And second, our worship styles and traditions are different.

”Queer, black, poor women are the church's salvation.“

There’s a certain existential weaponry that we get from our music, our time together, our space. The church is where we matter. You might be scrubbing white folk’s floors all day long, but on Sunday morning you’re sister so and so. I’m not necessarily concerned about the segregation of churches. I prefer to worship with folks that worship the way I worship.

And this is me stealing Chris Crass’ line—he says that the task of white churches is not about how many people of color they have. It’s what blow are they striking at white supremacy.

YES!: Do you see a possibility of a common cause between poor black folks and poor white folks? Or does the movement have to be a separate thing?

Sekou: I don’t know. I think in times of crisis people retreat to what they know. There’s definitely going to be more Balkanization. In our movement, there is a deep concern with black-only spaces because folks are trying to protect themselves and survive.

There has been some cross-racial organizing throughout history. Martin Luther King organized the poor peoples’ campaign, but when he was killed the campaign fell apart. You get a little of it with Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition. Those coalitions are usually weak and don’t hold well.

What has emerged now is something that definitely looks different. There may be the potential of a multiracial alliance that’s black-led.

But this generation has experienced the disintegration of its community. Cornel West talks about the catastrophes visited on black communities, whether it be gentrification, the prison-industrial complex, the new Jim Crow, demonization of welfare mothers, the shredding of the welfare state, the fact that somebody black or brown dies every other day in America at the hands of the police, the exponential increase in access to weapons, or the limited access to education and health care.

You have millennials who saw at all of that and said: “We are going to love our way out.” Which echoes Toni Morrison’s book, Beloved: “Love your hands, love your flesh, ‘cause out yonder, they don’t love your flesh.” That’s what we’re talking about. (Editor’s note: You can find the full passage here.)

One of the recent actions was black women, naked in San Francisco, presenting their bodies as living sacrifices. They were saying, “We love our flesh.” That’s a Beloved moment. This generation has made a commitment to love its way out.

YES!: What do you think is coming next?

Sekou: I have no idea. They’ll keep killing us, and we are going to continue resisting. I know that.

They'll keep killing us, and we are going to continue resisting.

A watershed moment in the history of the nation is taking down the American Swastika. That’s all it is—the Confederate flag is anti-American. It is a treasonous flag, and we were holding space for it because it represents the sensibility of a large swath of the country that is not just simply in the South.

That’s also what’s unique about this moment: Everything is up for debate. The conversation I’m hearing around this country is not about police reform, it’s about the very nature of policing. Do we honestly need them in our communities? There are folks developing programs so that the police are the last person you call—not the first.

I don’t know what comes next. I just know that the people are going to continue to resist, and it’s a great moment to be alive.

]]>No publisherYTW Feature2015/07/22 00:00:00 GMT-7ArticleDangerous Isolation: Meet the Fearless Advocates Helping Rural Women Escape Abusehttp://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/meet-fearless-advocates-helping-rural-women-escape-abuse-west-virginia
“If you live miles up in the holler and your cellphone doesn’t work up there, and you don’t have a car, and you don’t read and write very well, and you’ve got three kids, how are you going to get help?”Two years ago, Lois Howard’s ex-husband put her in the hospital for 12 days. Afterward, a concerned social worker sent her to Safe Harbor, an emergency shelter in Ashland, Kentucky, that handles domestic violence cases and advocates for the survivors. Howard arrived with no clothes except the ones she was wearing, no money, and no friends or family nearby.

At the age of 86, Tina Manns shows no sign of slowing down.

At first, she resented being there and vowed to leave as soon as possible. But she eventually warmed to the staff and other residents. In the end, she stayed at Safe Harbor for two years.

During that time, she has thrived. She got divorced, moved into her own apartment, attended the New Opportunity School for Women in Berea, Kentucky (which she enthusiastically recommends), and won the United Way of Northeast Kentucky’s award for Volunteer of the Year. She has also gone down 12 dress sizes, improved her physical stamina, and developed an exercise routine. Her bright red hair, which had fallen out due to a poor diet, is growing back, and she wears it in a trim pageboy. And most importantly to her, she has found her vocation as head of donations at Safe Harbor.

When I visited Howard in May 2015, three bags of donated clothes had just come in, and she was thrilled. She couldn’t wait to get her hands on them so we walked to the donation room together and talked while she sorted through the dresses and skirts, exclaiming in delight when she found some with tags still on them.

Transformations like Howard’s are not easy to pull off in rural Appalachia, where poor roads, low incomes, and a fiercely traditional culture combine to leave women facing domestic violence in physical and emotional isolation. But a handful of nonprofit shelters and advocates have managed to make progress in this difficult setting.

The secret of their success seems to be listening carefully to the women they serve and then handcrafting programs for those women. The advocates have found that when it comes to domestic violence, a one-size solution does not fit all. It is important to consider community and culture in order to make real differences in the lives of domestic violence survivors, a lesson for shelters everywhere.

I spent much of the month of May visiting some of these rural shelters. Even though I’ve lived in West Virginia for eight years, as I drove into the state’s southern counties I felt like I was entering a different world. The six-lane highways turned into narrow roads curving around mountains. Trucks carrying lumber hurtled past me on the switchbacks. Densely green woods surrounded me with cool, still beauty, and the towns were few and far between. I lost cell service almost immediately. For me, the solitude seemed idyllic. But this kind of isolation can be deadly for a woman trying to escape from an abusive home, especially if she is responsible for children and animals.

Pam Gillenwater, program director of the YWCA Resolve Family Abuse Program in Charleston, put it succinctly: “If you live miles up in the holler and you don’t have a telephone, and you don’t have a land line, and your cellphone doesn’t work up there, and you don’t have a car, and you don’t read and write very well, and you’ve got three kids, how are you going to get help?”

Unusual challenges

In addition to the populous and relatively prosperous Kanawha County, where Charleston is located, Resolve serves the struggling rural counties of Boone and Clay, where unemployment rates are high and college graduation rates are low. In order to let the women who live there know about available services, Gillenwater says that fliers with phone numbers have been more effective than Facebook or Twitter. And when it comes to designing them, simpler is better.

“In the rural areas we have to be considerate and mindful of literacy,” Gillenwater explained.

The police too are crucial partners.

Resolve’s communication director Marilyn Wrenn puts key words in boldface, especially the word “free.” “That’s the major thing people want to know because we are talking about extremely poor women,” she said.

Confidential is another word the fliers emphasize. It’s hard to be anonymous in rural areas, and residents can be mistrustful of outsiders. The solution, according to Gillenwater, is for advocates to integrate themselves into the communities. So Resolve staffers make regular appearances at the Boone County’s West Virginia Coal Festival and the Clay County Golden Delicious Apple Festival. They never miss Headstart orientations, attend church services, and make friends with preachers and school principals.

Persistence is also important. After 23 years in Boone County, Resolve outreach advocate Tina Manns is an institution. When I walked with her through downtown Madison, where she works in a small, cluttered office next to the courthouse, she greeted everyone by name, asking after their parents, health, and children. Some hugged her while others shook her hand.

It hadn’t always been that way. When she first took the job, she found that people didn’t trust her and could be outright hostile to her efforts to champion the cause of abused women. Courtroom regulars called her “that old white-haired bitch” when she walked women down the halls to get protective orders.

“I turned around one day and said, ‘I don’t know what you all would do if I ever dyed my hair,’” Manns reminisced.

But the same magistrates who were once reluctant to take her seriously are now the ones she trusts most to issue protective orders. She has been working here so long that she now helps the children of her original clients. Even after losing several women to violence over the years, she remains indefatigable. She runs a support group for survivors of domestic violence every Tuesday, accompanies women to court, drives them to the shelter, and helps them sign up for benefits. At the age of 86, she shows no sign of slowing down. Her goal is to transfer the credibility she’s earned onto newer advocates, bringing them to support groups, court, or the office of the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources.

Manns and other advocates consider this department to be an important partner for domestic violence advocates because so many women in rural Appalachia are on public assistance and must visit their local office to pick up checks and sign papers. Men who monitor their wives’ movements still have to let them go to the DHHR office.

Pam Gillenwater has conducted workshops with the Departments’ supervisors and staff on how to get a victim alone without arousing suspicion—for example, bringing her into a private room on the pretext of signing papers. Once alone, staff can explain what services Resolve can offer her and ask if the woman wants help. If she is ready to leave her living situation, the staff can call an advocate. The fearless Tina Manns has exchanged jackets with a woman to sneak her out of the DHHR office while the husband waited in the parking lot.

The police too are crucial partners for domestic violence shelters. They are frequently the first point of contact for women experiencing abuse and can make referrals to advocates. In rural Appalachia, however, victims may be reluctant to call the police if their perpetrators have friends or family on the force. They may also worry about having their cases taken seriously, especially if they have called before. Meanwhile, resources are often stretched thin in rural police departments, so officers aren’t always trained to understand domestic violence.

Michelle Carpenter, the executive director at Haven of Hope in Cambridge, Ohio, has worked hard to change that situation in her region. During her six years as director, she has launched several programs designed to create an educated and trauma-conscious police force. She started a new officer training program, in which officers work with her a week at a time, sitting in on victim interviews and learning how to build rapport with trauma victims. Jeffrey Paden, the local county sheriff, says he carries her fliers and calls Haven of Hope whenever he gets a call about a potential case of abuse.

Carpenter says the partnership has helped dispel fears of law enforcement. She also does confidential trauma support with the officers themselves, visiting the station for private meetings and operating a 24/7 hotline where police can debrief about tough cases.

When neighbors are far away

In the hills and hollers of Appalachia, contact with outsiders can be scarce. This isolation has helped preserve the region’s famous legacy of art, music, and storytelling for many generations. Many Appalachians are fiercely proud of this unique culture. But long distances between homes can create obstacles for women trying to escape an abusive situation. For example, people in the region may not have neighbors that can take pets and farm animals in for a woman who wants to leave a violent household.

Most shelters allow women to move in with their children. But advocates found that women wouldn’t leave a household unless the animals had a way out too.

“Nobody sees what goes on, so it’s OK.”

Tatiana Duvall moved from St. Petersburg, Russia, to southern Ohio to marry a man she believed would be a loving and kind partner for the rest of her life. But when she arrived at his farm, she found a different reality. He refused to let her leave the farm, get a job, apply for a driver’s license, or make friends. He beat and choked her regularly and also abused her black-and-white border collie, Dina. Duvall knew she couldn’t take Dina with her to a shelter but she was afraid that if she left, her husband might kill her dog in retaliation.

Tatiana Duvall with her dog, Dina. Photo courtesy of Tatiana Duvall.

When she sought help from Haven of Hope, Carpenter called Lisa Bell, a volunteer officer at the local humane society, who found a foster family for Dina. During the seven months while Duvall lived at the shelter, Lisa arranged for her to visit Dina in safe public places. In the meantime, Duvall found a job and got an apartment.

Today, Duvall and Dina live together in western Pennsylvania where Tatiana works as a web designer.

Carpenter and Bell currently have four families that can take animals from horses to dogs to cows. They are hoping to expand the program and particularly to find more funding for vet bills.

“Once you provide safety for the animals, you are providing safety for the humans,” Bell explained.

But the relationship between isolation and abuse goes beyond making sure animals and people have a safe place to go when they are ready to leave. Many advocates in the region say the root of the problem is violence that’s passed on within a family from one generation to the next.

For me, the solitude seemed idyllic. But isolation can be deadly.

“They just by and large accept domestic violence because it’s generational in nature,” said Jennifer Allen, an outreach advocate from Safe Harbor who works in Elliott County, one of the most rural counties in Kentucky. “They’ve seen it growing up. Their intimate partner has seen it growing up. So, sadly, it is almost an accepted way of life.”

Gillenwater agreed, and talked about her experiences in a court-ordered class she’d taught for years. “It was not uncommon, especially in these rural areas when I taught the batterers’ program, to have a father and a son come to group, an uncle and his nephew, a grandfather and his grandson. We’ve had them carpool together.”

Lois Howard says she lived through generations of domestic violence herself. Her father abused her mother, and she has seen it come up in the younger generations of her family. “Out in the country, it’s different. Nobody sees what goes on, so it’s OK.”

She believes that a different approach to education could change that, and advocates agree that schools are the ideal places to change attitudes toward gender relations and violence. Both Resolve and Safe Harbor hold regular discussions on bullying at the elementary school level and move onto teen dating in middle and high schools.

Lois says she could never have imagined an institution like Safe Harbor while she was growing up in Rockcastle County, in the eastern coalfields of Kentucky.

“The area where I’m from, we don’t know about places like this.”

]]>No publisherYTW Feature2015/07/15 11:00:00 GMT-7ArticleFinding a House That Fits Is About More Than Just Sizehttp://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/make-it-right/finding-a-house-that-fits-is-about-more-than-just-size
Going from a suburban Versailles to a cabin in the woods was just what I needed to find home.I was sitting at a crowded New York café when my friend Anne put my life into perspective. She and her husband had just completed their search for a new home and had brought a singular sense of responsibility to the process. “We don’t need anything big,” she said. “It was just good stewardship to find a house that fit us.”

In This Issue

They were settling into a small college town and needed a place that would hold their books, provide space to be together and apart, and become a gathering place for students and faculty. The result was a two-up, two-down Civil War-era structure that seemed the very definition of home.

In contrast, my partner and I shared a house that sprawled across 4,000 square feet in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. It contained two living rooms, a pair of bedrooms with private baths, and a master suite that included a dressing area the size of a New York studio apartment. We made blank, contemporary spaces livable with oak trim, rich colors, and landscape paintings that evoked my Northern California roots. None of it muffled the echoes in the hallway.

Anne’s words stung. I’d already been mildly embarrassed by the size of my home, but I’d never felt guilty about it. Suddenly it had all the qualities of a suburban Versailles. Returning from my New York visit, I entered the house and stopped at its central crossroads, where a long hallway meets a two-story vestibule and blood-red staircase. Two thoughts hit me: 1) I am a very bad steward, and 2) this is not, in fact, home.

The painful truth is that Eric and I had recently left a perfect house, a Cape Cod-style cottage with two tiny bedrooms and a narrow stair to a livable attic. We squeezed past each other in the hall and bumped butts in the kitchen, always aware of each other’s presence, always touching as we moved through the day.

The decision to move to Versailles was a domestic catch-22. The house had been designed and inhabited by one of Eric’s early mentors, the architect who transformed a bumper-plating garage into the suburban theater that put Eric on the map. When he died, we got first dibs on the place. I knew if we didn’t take it, Eric would always regret it. I also knew that the house had been created for a husband, wife, and two aging mothers-in-law. It was designed to provide privacy and distance, not to bring people together.

Happily, we had a retreat that offered all the things the new house lacked. Tucked among the mountains of West Virginia, it gave us a periodic escape from friends, colleagues, critics, and hangers-on. We played Scrabble, which I won, and gin rummy, which Eric did, and we enjoyed hammock-swinging days of reading and napping.

I named the cabin Wolf House after the home that Jack London built in the Sonoma hills, not far from where I grew up. London’s mansion of stone and redwood burned to the ground just before he moved in—nature’s revenge on a best-selling author’s hubris—but ours was so small that hubris wasn’t a problem.

The house is just one room, 20 feet by 20 feet, surrounded by 11 acres of forest. A tight spiral staircase leads to matched sleeping lofts that look out on oaks and elms, and beyond to a view that is endless, and endlessly changing. It’s an efficient, livable space easily heated by a single wood-burning stove—the exact opposite of the interlocking expanse of rooms that greeted us each time we returned to the suburbs.

As Eric’s growing success carried him to theaters in New York and London, Wolf House shifted from a romantic getaway to a writer’s retreat. In summer, deadlines met, I dozed on the deck, the trees in constant motion above me. In winter, I stretched on the couch, reading or watching the fire. Leaving became increasingly difficult. It took a death in the family, though, to wake me to the reality of my situation.

The home my parents chose for retirement reflected their values exactly. Shadowed by redwoods on the lower slopes of the California Sierras, it’s a funky sequence of rooms added haphazardly by previous owners, all of it spilling into a central, firelit living room. In the summer, I arrived to find Mom on the deck, iced tea at hand and an Anthony Trollope novel in her lap. Her grandchildren—my sister’s daughters—slept in rooms lined with the books we’d known as children: Terhune’s "Lad: A Dog," Stevenson’s "Treasure Island," and the long-forgotten adventures of Richard Halliburton, whom my mother had idolized in her own childhood.

Mom battled cancer for eight years in that house, passing through remission and recurrence three times. At the onset of her last illness, she and my father moved into a senior community below the snow line, and my sister and I walked the minefield of deciding who got the great-grandparents’ oak icebox and who got the piano. We were together when Mom breathed her last, in the bedroom of a prefabricated home on a cul-de-sac in a gated community.

The summer of her death was a busy one. Eric joined us in California for a few days and was there, quiet and supportive, as we spread Mom’s ashes in a meadow high in the mountains. He left quickly though, to oversee a repertory season of Sondheim musicals. I followed close behind to begin rehearsals for a new play and, at the end of August, throw a party for Eric’s 40th birthday. Stephen Sondheim and Frank Rich roamed the halls of Versailles. Hoots and hollers rang out from family and friends. Toasts were made. And I began to look for something that would make me feel at home again.

I began to look for something that would make me feel at home again.

I cried on the steps of our blood-red staircase when I learned that I’d been accepted to the graduate program at St. John’s College in Annapolis, just an hour from Washington. My mother would have understood better than anyone the draw of a program based entirely in the reading of “great books.” Seated at heavy wood tables near dormant fireplaces, I soon joined with my peers to learn math from Euclid, science from Darwin, philosophy from Aristotle, religion from St. Paul, and poetry from Shakespeare.

While my studies drew me into a thoughtful, quiet life, Eric’s career arced forward on a heady mix of agents, producers, and gala openings. Most of our conversations now took place by phone, usually during my evening drive home from Annapolis. When I declared that I was ditching a freelance job writing for a Disney theme park so I could concentrate on school, there was a long silence—then the suggestion that I keep the gig and quit St. John’s.

A week before my final departure from Versailles, a friend and I loaded a rental van with my belongings and drove them to West Virginia. A van is all it took. Living at Wolf House would be like living on a ship, everything in its place and no room for superfluities. A week later, I made my official and final getaway. In the passenger seat of my Geo Metro sat the companion of my future years, a shelter mutt named Rocket.

A Husky-Lab mix with the diamond-shaped face of a wolf, Rocket is white from stem to stern, and known variously as Rocket, Rocketman, Whack-Job, and Bad Dog. Days before, he had watched one of his masters depart for a preemptive vacation in Mexico. Now, as that newly tanned ex-partner circled over Dulles, the Rocketman and I hurried west, into a blizzard.

I had studied enough spiritual texts at St. John’s to recognize the mythic quality of our adventure. To begin our new life, we scaled icy mountains and forded frozen streams—literally. At the dirt road that carried us the final few miles, the drifts rose halfway to our windows, but we fishtailed forward. Snowbound for three days, we sat and watched the fire.

My life was now bound by oaks and elms that were themselves home to deer and snakes and the occasional black bear. I experienced the slow evolution of a season—or of a day. The valley below and the mountains beyond rolled through wintry shades of gray and blue. The morning came when a songbird appeared, his yellow chest puffing with the exertion of the migration north. A few days later there were two of them. Then three.

The vegetation made the same halting approach. The red bud came and went, the mountain laurel peaked and faded back to green. Every morning Rocket and I walked a two-mile loop of dirt road, wading through the washouts that followed heavy rains. We became accustomed to the black dog that attacked as we rounded the curve, and we waved to its mistress and her grandchild as they drove down the hill to meet the school bus.

Financial demands soon drew me away from the reflective work begun at St. John’s and from the peace of Wolf House. Scripting a series of PBS documentaries submerged me in the lives of Van Gogh and Cassatt, but a constant influx of bills meant that I was also back to writing dialogue for Mickey, Minnie, and the gang. The need for integrity-based, steady income was increasingly apparent.

My thoughts turned, with annoyance, to my mother. She seldom dictated our behavior but gently guided my sister and me to our own discoveries. There was just one piece of advice that she annually proclaimed. She believed that I should be a teacher and insisted that I would be a good one. I bridled every time she said it. “I’m a writer,” I insisted.

My sole interview was at a Washington, D.C., charter school serving low-income neighborhoods. In late July they had lost two of their English teachers and were desperate. A few weeks later, Rocket and I moved into a sunken, oak-paneled apartment in John Philip Sousa’s birthplace. The windows were level with the brick sidewalk. The bedroom was barely wide enough for a standard mattress, and the living room just able to accommodate an office nook and tiny kitchen. But there were built-in bookshelves, wall space for the California landscapes I’d retained, and a bathroom of 1930s yellow and black tile.

Over the next few years, Rocket and I made it to Wolf House most weekends, with teachers occasionally joining us to sit on the deck and argue literature and politics. Our trips became less frequent, though, when I devoted my Sunday mornings to a Unitarian Universalist church, where a chance meeting led to yet another beginning.

I experienced the slow evolution of a season—or of a day.

As I draft these final paragraphs, Rocket, now 13, lies curled in the winter sun. My partner Gary sits at his desk in the attic three floors above but will soon descend so that we can stroll to our neighborhood lunch spot. My time is split in thirds: I teach, I write, and I’m home every day at 3:30 when my stepson Isaac steps off the bus. We do his homework together at the kitchen counter.

Our row house has the original wood floors from 1911, sanded thin. We’ve got a small backyard, space for our books and pictures, room to be together and apart. There’s a stain in the ceiling of the master bedroom that needs to be addressed, and it will soon become untenable for three men to share a bathroom, but the landscapes blend well with Gary’s more contemporary tastes, and my great-grandparents’ icebox has its place of honor.

On Friday afternoon, Rocket pricks his ears as I retrieve my green backpack from the closet. By the time I throw in a stack of books and a change of underwear, he’s whining at the front door. Outside, he leaps into the back of our family-safe Subaru, then sleeps the length of I-66, waking only when I signal for the exit that will take us west, into the hills. On the final few miles of dirt road, he starts to bark.

]]>No publisherThemeYTW Feature2015/07/07 00:00:00 GMT-7ArticleWhy Bree Newsome’s Action Was the “Amazing Grace” I Neededhttp://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/why-bree-newsome-s-grace-is-more-amazing-than-barack-obama-s
She showed us that we liberate ourselves through our actions. She reminded us, in the midst of deep sorrow, that we, who want to see a better America, must keep living, fighting, breathing, doing.On Friday, June 24, I turned on my television to watch the funeral for Reverend Clementa Pinckney, one of the nine people shot dead at the Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina.

President Obama sang “Amazing Grace” at a time when many in the nation are mourning not only for the lost lives of the Emanuel 9, but the loss of black life that is stitched into the fabric of this country.

But then Bree Newsome allowed me to breathe.

I have heard “Amazing Grace” many times in my life. Black Americans singing, in moments of deep despair, is too familiar. I did not need to hear those sounds at this moment in our history. I needed something, but that was not it.

I switched to C-SPAN and, instead of seeing the funeral, I saw the news instead and learned that the U.S. Supreme Court had legalized same-sex marriage in all 50 states. I felt a surge of joy because I am truly invested in human rights for all in this country.

Yet I wondered if the many who were celebrating the Supreme Court ruling were feeling the death of the Emanuel 9 with the same depth as they felt this victory. As a black American, it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain a sense of joy. These days, I am afraid to look at my social media feeds because, inevitably, I will see news of another murdered, unarmed, black person. It takes everything I have to not get crushed under the weight of the deep sorrow that many black people and our allies are feeling in this moment.

So I was not sure how to feel, how to be joyful for this forward movement in the country.

Fortunately, social media exploded with another story. On Saturday, June 27, I turned to my social media feeds and there, like a beam of light, was Bree Newsome taking down the Confederate flag from the Capitol building in Columbia, South Carolina.

“We removed the flag today because we can’t wait any longer,” Newsome said in a statement she sent out by email. A graduate of New York University who has directed films and played in a funk band called Powerhouse, Newsome’s action has already garnered more than $115,000 on an Indiegogo campaign.

Until Newsome’s action, I had been imploding with rage at the fact that South Carolina did not have the decency to take down that flag as the body of Clementa Pinckney—who was a South Carolina state senator as well as a preacher—was brought to the state house. There was a lump in my throat, in my heart. The presence of that flag, with every wave, laid salt in the wound of the tragedy.

But then Bree Newsome allowed me to breathe. The anger and hurt disappeared, for a moment, because she let us know we are still powerful. She showed us that we liberate ourselves through our actions. She reminded us, in the midst of deep sorrow, that we, who want to see a better America, must keep living, fighting, breathing, doing.

Her act spoke to me in a way that the president’s singing did not. The singing of “Amazing Grace” felt like a familiar trope in the narrative of black America: We suffer, we sing, we forgive. Newsome’s actions were different and more inspired. They addressed white supremacy directly. When many were arguing that the Confederate flag could not be removed because of legal reasons, Newsome removed it. In that act, she reminded us that Americans who want to see change, can write a bolder narrative.

We must maintain a sense of love, joy, hope, and movement as we grieve. But that is hard to do when black America and our allies are suffering through a constant stream of murdered black Americans, together with symbols of our oppression like the Confederate flag.

Newsome demonstrated that it is possible to hold two conflicting emotions in balance. Out of her grief came an action that challenged racism and brought joy to me and to thousands of others. Joy is essential to struggle. Within the joy, planning, strategizing, hand holding, falling in love, and caring for one another, we extend the legacy of the murdered. I do not let them go when I am caught up in a moment of folly. I do not let them go when I am at the botanical gardens, talking with a friend about our suffering. They are walking with me, in my life, with every step. I remind myself of that. I remind myself that I am here to keep their memory alive and to work so that others do not suffer a similar fate. I still feel the ache of their loss, even as I celebrate the victories.

I am trying to balance sorrow and joy. These days, I seem to experience the former more than the latter. I need something to be done about white violence, and I mean something substantial, on the order of the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage. The president singing “Amazing Grace” was not that thing.

Bree Newsome reminded me there is a legacy in black America that joins singing and spirituality and action. She reminded me that what I really need to see is the Confederate flag—and everything it represents—taken down.

]]>No publisherYTW Feature2015/06/29 15:00:00 GMT-7ArticleObama’s Push for Corporate Rule: A Moment of Opportunityhttp://www.yesmagazine.org/obamas-push-for-corporate-rule-a-moment-of-opportunity
Call it populism versus corporatism or democracy versus corporate rule. Either way, it is a far more meaningful political division than two political parties debating big government versus small.Only a few months ago, President Barack Obama was at loggerheads with Republican members of Congress intent on destroying his administration. With bewildering speed, Obama has since turned against his own political base to form an alliance on trade issues with those same Republican members of Congress.

Obama’s most vigorous opposition now comes from progressives, including most of the senators and representatives of his own party, who only a few months ago were his most loyal political base. The few corporatist Democratic members of Congress who still support Obama face the threat of opposition in the 2016 primaries, as Democratic voters mobilize to defend democracy, workers, and the environment.

TTP will strengthen corporate rights.

The goal of Obama’s surprise alliance is to finalize a series of international agreements—the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA)—each of which will strengthen corporate rights at the expense of human rights, democracy, economic justice, peace, and the healing of Living Earth.

Leaked text from the secret negotiations that are crafting these agreements reveals that contrary to the claims of proponents, virtually every provision would weaken democracy and undermine the ability of nations, people, and localities to shape their economic destinies. Americans from across the political spectrum have been stunned by the sudden emergence of this unholy alliance. In historical context, however, it may be less unlikely than it seems.

America’s bipartisan corporate political alliance

U.S. corporations have been actively advancing an agenda of corporate rule since at least 1971. That was when Lewis Powell, soon to be a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, submitted his infamous memo “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System” outlining a grand strategy for a corporate takeover of U.S. politics. The resulting actions rapidly played out as a global corporate colonization of the world’s people and resources. I spell out this history in detail in When Corporations Rule the World, released this month (June 2015) in a 20th anniversary edition.

Corporations have been advancing an agenda since at least 1971.

As the corporate agenda unfolded, the Republican Party quite proudly branded itself as the party of big business and, more deceptively, of small government. The Democratic Party became seen as the party of big government, corporate restraint, and social programs for those the corporate state excluded.

But there has long been more cooperation between the two parties in support of big business than either is inclined to acknowledge. Democratic President Carter began the deregulation of the airline industry. Democratic President Clinton rolled back welfare programs, expanded corporate rights with the passage of the WTO and NAFTA agreements, and sponsored the Wall Street deregulation that led to the financial collapse of 2008.

Democratic President Obama carried forward the bank bailouts started by Republican President George W. Bush, shielded senior bank managers from prosecution and prison, and made no effort to restrict the continued growth and consolidation of the biggest Wall Street banks. His campaign for fast-track authority to push through a series of new international corporate rights agreements removes all ambiguity as to where his true loyalties lie.

The public, however, is catching on. Awareness of accelerating consolidation of global corporate rule and its implications for peace, equality, and the environment began to emerge in the mid-1990s about the time When Corporations Rule the World first launched. For many people, that book helped them connect what they were experiencing with what they were beginning to suspect.

The issue a bogus debate obscures

For the past several decades, corporate interests have managed to define the political choice in America as between small government Republicans and big government Democrats. It was a clever misdirection. Because most Americans are properly distrustful of big government, they easily buy into the anti-big government argument. The result is to deflect attention away from the sins of big business—and the implications for government size.

The public, however, is catching on.

The idea that government is essential to the function of complex societies should be immediately evident to any thinking person. It is similarly clear that letting money-seeking transnational corporations rule as best suits their financial interests has disastrous societal consequences.

Entirely missing from the debate is the extent to which it is the growth of corporate size and influence that creates the need for big government to limit corporate excesses, clean up their messes, subsidize their operations, and field the military and police forces required to protect their global and domestic properties. The subsidies include welfare for underpaid employees, unemployment for those whose jobs they outsource abroad or displace with robots and migrant workers, and medical insurance for those they fail to insure.

Without the burden that monopolistic and predatory corporations place on society, government, particularly national government, could be dramatically downsized and public debt largely eliminated.

An abstract debate over the size of government is a pointless distraction—as those who promote it are likely aware. We should instead ask, “Does our federal government represent the interests of the United States and its people and is its size appropriate to that task?” Tragically, the answer for the United State is no.

Although the American people pay the bills, it is a government of, by, and for the United Corporations of Planet Earth and their needs, not a government designed to meet the needs of our people. We could do nicely with a far smaller federal government, if we limited the size of corporations and structured their ownership to assure that they are accountable to the people of the communities in which they do business.

The essential work of our time

The institutional system of corporate rule is essentially a robotic system programmed to use its economic and political power to extract limitless short-term financial gain by whatever means available. It runs on autopilot beyond human control. And it values life only for its market price. It should be evident to any thinking adult not brain damaged by taking too many economics courses that peace, economic justice, and ecological balance will remain beyond humanity’s reach for so long as the rights of people are subordinated to the rights of the corporations that populate this system.

Hope for humanity requires a successful transition to democracy grounded in strong place-based communities and local economies. This transition is not just an ideal. It is essential to human viability.

President Obama and the Republican and Democratic corporatists currently allied with him have positioned themselves on the wrong side of history.

Fortunately, there may be a positive side to their betrayal of the human interest. It reminds us that true transformational leadership depends less on the empty promises of political leaders than on social movements of we the people. The public outrage now focused on their betrayal of democracy and the human interest lays the groundwork for what could be a seismic political realignment.

Possibilities of a transpartisan political awakening

Over the past 20 years, public awareness of the nature and consequences of the expansion of corporate rule has grown significantly. This awareness finds particularly visible expression in the public demand to overturn the Citizens United decision of a corporatist Supreme Court that removes most restraints on corporate funding of elections. And, most recently, we are seeing broad-based and increasingly vocal resistance to the current betrayal of America by Obama’s trade agenda.

Does our government represent the interests of the US and its people?

Progressive voters are outraged by the assault on democracy, workers, the environment, and local communities entailed in the Trans Pacific Partnership. Conservative voters are outraged by the attack on national sovereignty.

The resulting political shock is shining a public spotlight on the extent to which corporate influence has corrupted our national government. It is a short step from here to a recognition that the failures and burdens of our national government are not inherent in government. Rather they are inherent in corporate control of government.

Two highly intelligent, articulate national leaders—Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—are articulating a new message with the potential to redefine the debate and win broad support for steps to end corporate rule. Even voters who may disagree with their politics are drawn to their courage and integrity—qualities otherwise far too rare in American politics.

The moment seems ripe for the foundational political realignment proposed by Ralph Nader in his recent book Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State and outlined in a recent YES! Magazine interview with Ralph Nader and Daniel McCarthy, editor of The American Conservative magazine. Fran Korten, publisher of YES! Magazine (and my wife) suggests we are experiencing a new populist moment.

Call it populism versus corporatism or democracy versus corporate rule. Either way it is a far more meaningful political division than the current division between two big-government political parties debating big versus small while both compete aggressively for corporate money and pursue variations on corporatist agendas.

The distinction between democracy and corporate rule is the issue that underlies most other issues. The task before us is to recognize and act on the potential for a momentous political realignment that can make our government truly “of the people.”

]]>No publisherYTW Feature2015/06/25 09:00:00 GMT-7ArticleTwo Things White People Should Never Sayhttp://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/make-it-right/two-things-white-people-should-never-say
“I’m not racist, but...” and other things to avoid saying when talking about race.I am white, and the woman I’m meeting is black. I have lived in Austin, Texas, for more than two decades, and she recently moved here. We bumped into each other at an event and learned we have similar political interests. I invited her to coffee to talk about local organizing, and after introductions the first thing I say is, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to join a nonprofit board.”

Thankfully, she laughs at my attempt at white self-deprecation. Non-white people in progressive politics are used to being asked to join boards or speak at events to diversify an otherwise all-white group. Such invitations often come too early, before people have worked together long enough to know if the invitation makes sense. Sometimes, as my joke suggested, the invitation comes right after the coffee is poured.

How do I know about this problem? Because I’ve been part of it. In my first organizing efforts in the anti-war movement in the 1990s, I sometimes found myself in meetings with other white people, looking around the room and saying, “There are no people of color here. Where can we find some?” But if cross-racial alliances don’t already exist, last-minute efforts to find a non-white speaker for the rally or a non-white committee member are not only transparent tokenism but corrosive to creating meaningful connections.

So, my first rule for myself as a white person is: Avoid tokenism. No matter what the issue, think about the question of racial justice at the start of a project, not when it’s too late to create a real coalition.

Here’s my second rule. Listen up homies. Don’t sprinkle “street” terms picked up from movies or songs into conversations in an attempt to sound hip.

OK, enough rules. There are lots of guidelines for white people that cover everything from complex tasks in building cross-racial solidarity to simple reminders about avoiding racialized rudeness. For instance:

Such guides can be helpful, but I’m skeptical of checklists, fearing that having rules to follow can replace the endless struggle to be strategic while remaining a decent person.

So, rather than a list, I want to offer two phrases that white people should never utter.

The first: “I’m not racist, but …” Whatever follows is almost guaranteed to be racist; if a statement isn’t, there’s no need to announce its non-racism. If you hear yourself forming that phrase, shut up and think about what you intended to say and why.

I want to offer two phrases that white people should never utter.

The second: “I know I’m a racist, and …” This is a different evasion, a more subtle attempt at inoculation. Yes, it’s true enough that virtually all white people are socialized into some kind of white-supremacist thinking (myself included) and that the struggle to unlearn those lessons is not simple and never completed (again, personal experience here). And all white people, even those who might legitimately claim to have purged all that racist training, still retain the advantages that come with being white.

But invoking the “I know I’m a racist” trope is dangerous. Instead of suggesting you have transcended white supremacy, you confess immersion in it, as if the confession is evidence of clarity and therefore whatever comes next is beyond challenge, given your heightened level of white self-awareness. But the “confession” is disingenuous; if we cannot distinguish between progressive white people working to achieve racial justice and members of the Klan—if all white people truly are “racist”—then the word has no meaning. It’s dishonest for progressive white people to claim to be beyond racism, but it’s counterproductive to pretend that none of us have made meaningful progress.

As long as I’m focused on words to avoid, let me nominate two more phrases: “white ally” and “doing the work.”

If one is white, being an ally to non-white people in a white-supremacist society is a good thing. But “white ally” too often becomes a merit badge to mark that one is on the right side. No matter how much we remain critically self-reflective, merit badges tend to lead us to think of ourselves as superior to those without the badge. That leads, understandably, to people of color being wary of self-proclaimed white allies.

“Doing the work” feels plain self-righteous to me. What exactly is the work that needs constant marking? Often the most effective white people in a community organization simply model anti-racist behavior without trumpeting it. I’ve seen the phrase misused enough that I shy away from it.

Checklists can remind us of important rules.

Checklists can remind us of important rules. But the main rule is to cultivate the instinct for critical self-reflection—which we too often suppress because it can be painful—so that we believe in ourselves enough to be honest with others. Instead of striving to be white allies doing the work, we can do our best to avoid the many traps white supremacy lays for us and struggle to be fully human. We white folks cannot expect others to treat us as if we are fully human until we believe it about ourselves.

]]>No publisherThemeYTW Feature2015/06/17 09:00:00 GMT-7ArticleWhat’s Next for the World’s Largest Federation of Worker-Owned Co-Ops?http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/world-s-largest-federation-of-worker-owned-co-operatives-mondragon-josu-ugarte
A conversation with Mondragon President Josu Ugarte on the future of the mega-cooperative.In early May, President Barack Obama visited Nike’s headquarters in Oregon to gather support for the Trans Pacific Partnership, a trade deal between the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries.

Critics of the deal have charged that it would increase income inequality, weaken labor and environmental protections, and encourage U.S. companies to offshore jobs. With its history of offshoring American jobs, Nike is an obvious ally for the deal, argues commentator Rose Aguilar at The Guardian.

But what if there were an alternative corporate model for the president and other world leaders to shape their thinking around? A model that was still globally competitive but empowered local workers and addresses income inequality?

Mondragon Corporation, a federation of 103 worker-owned cooperatives based in the Basque region of Spain, could provide an example. Unlike Nike, which is controlled by a small group of shareholders, ordinary workers are deeply involved in Mondragon’s decision-making process.

Mondragon made about €11.6 billion ($13.1 billion) in income in 2013. The corporation employs more than 74,000 people around the world. About 60,000 are worker-owners, or “associates,” who own assets in the company and can be elected to the General Assembly, the body that oversees the corporation.

With Mondragon, you won’t find the pay gap between executives and workers that are typical of multinational corporations. Managers at Mondragon cannot make more than six times the salary of their lowest paid workers.

Mondragon is not without its challenges. In 2013, it had to close Fagor Electrodomesticos, a member cooperative that manufactured domestic appliances and employed almost 2,000 people. But the way it handled that crisis shows how having workers in control makes a difference. Instead of sending the laid-off workers to seek unemployment benefits from the government, Mondragon retrained them and found new jobs for most of them at other member cooperatives.

YES! talked with Josu Ugarte, the president of Mondragon International, about cooperative values, how its member co-ops support one another, and how it interacts with its workers outside of Spain.

This interview has been edited.

Hansen: How is Mondragon different from other companies?

Ugarte: For us, people are the most important asset. For example, let’s say we have one business that makes a profit of 1 percent. We could move this business to China or Poland and have a profit margin of 7 percent. But we don’t do that. Social issues are important to us. It’s true that if we don’t have profits, we don’t have employment. But we combine economic issues with social ones.

And we created a different way, in my opinion, for co-ops to work together. Apart from sharing profits, ownership, and management, we have three key values: solidarity, inter-cooperation, and social transformation.

Hansen: When you talk about social transformation, what do you mean?

“The challenge is how to integrate our workers who are outside of Spain.”

Ugarte: Our solidarity in terms of salaries changes the distribution of wealth in society. If the Basque region in Spain were a country, it would have the second-lowest income inequality in the world. So for me, this is social transformation. And I think that instead of starting by asking the state for some things, you could transform the United States by creating cooperatives and then putting all of them together, with the principle “one worker, one voter.”

Hansen: Tell me about a challenge you’ve experienced with the cooperative model.

Ugarte: For me, the challenge is how to integrate our workers who are outside of Spain. Currently we have 71 percent of our sales in industrial activities abroad. And we think that in 2020 that number will reach 80 percent. So that means that a lot of our profits come from outside of Spain. We have 12,000 workers abroad. We should study how to integrate these people because they will become more and more important in Mondragon’s future. We need them to have a Mondragon mentality. Hansen: And what is that mentality?

Ugarte: People come first in the Mondragon mentality. We’re transparent. And we want to have everybody participating in the company. But when we’ve tried to integrate workers in other countries, we couldn’t do that. For me this is the most important challenge.

Hansen: What do you think about international trade deals like the Trans Pacific Partnership?

“The argument is simple. It’s that you will be the owner of your future.”

Ugarte: Trade deals of that type tend to result in factories being moved overseas. Whereas Mondragon aims to keep existing businesses, while sometimes building new ones abroad. It’s the difference between delocalization and multilocalization.

Delocalization is moving businesses and destroying employment at home. For the United States, that’s normal. Mondragon cannot do that because we would need to vote in the general assembly. Our workers aren’t going to vote to eliminate their own jobs.

We see multilocalization as a winning strategy. In the end, if you have different factories in different parts of the world, the risk is reduced and performance is better.

For example, we have one company, Orkli, that has facilities in Spain, China, and Brazil. It’s a leading manufacturer of heating equipment, like water heaters and components for central heating systems.

Hansen: When did Mondragon first establish a plant outside of Spain?

Ugarte: The first one was in Copreci, Mexico, in 1989.

Hansen: You mentioned that Mondragon’s workers outside of Spain are nervous about becoming worker-owners. Why do you think that is?

Ugarte: We’ve run into two different kinds of situations. For example, workers in Poland didn’t want to have to take on the additional responsibility. As I said before, if you are a member or associate, then you may be chosen to be part of the supervisory board, which is a serious responsibility. For example, you will help make decisions about things like changing salaries or work hours. The people in Poland did not want to take this kind of position. They prefer to work from 8 to 5 and forget everything.

In France it was different. There, the unions were difficult. Some of their members were communists and wanted to become a company of the state. They didn’t want to become associates. It’s not easy to convince other people from other cultures to become associates.

Hansen: What are your arguments to try to convince them to become worker-owners or associates?

Ugarte: The argument is simple. It’s that you will be the owner of your future. You will decide your future. You will not be in the hands of one guy who will decide to move this factory to another country. You will not be in the hands of the CEO or of Wall Street. If you become an associate, you will decide what you want to do.

Hansen: What about closer to home? How do Mondragon cooperatives work together or support each other?

Ugarte: We help cooperatives negotiate with the banks. And we help when they have to relocate workers who’ve become unemployed. We contact the other co-ops and see if they can hire the people who are unemployed.

Hansen: Are there conflicts or challenges that arise with this kind of collaboration?

Ugarte: One thing I want to point out is that we’re a business, so we need to remain competitive. If we don’t do that, then we cannot create and share value. It comes up when one co-op needs to source supplies. If there’s another Mondragon company that makes those supplies, our manufacturer will ask them first. But if the price is not competitive, we’ll buy it from China.

The second point is that there are differences in the profitability of different companies within Mondragon. For example, if one company is turning a profit every year, then they are giving 30 percent of that profit to Mondragon. Then another company gives nothing because they are not making a profit. That can seem unfair. But the company that is successful today may have needed help 20 years ago. That is the best example of Mondragon and one of the keys of our success.

]]>No publisherYTW Feature2015/06/12 00:00:00 GMT-7ArticleCan America Heal After Ferguson? We Asked Desmond Tutu and His Daughterhttp://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/make-it-right/can-america-heal-after-ferguson-we-asked-desmond-tutu-and-his-daughter
South Africans surprised everyone by transitioning to a relatively peaceful post-apartheid society. Here’s what Americans can learn.Can we recover from the legacy of slavery, lynching, land theft, disenfranchisement, redlining, job discrimination, and mass imprisonment? We turned to Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his daughter the Rev. Mpho Tutu for wisdom on this question. Desmond Tutu led the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, formed in 1995. Many people anticipated violence and a breakdown of society as decades of apartheid ended. Instead, the country transitioned relatively peacefully to a multiracial democracy, in part because of the truth and reconciliation process.

As Archbishop Tutu describes, the process was tough but redemptive. Those seeking amnesty for human rights violations had to fully disclose their actions. Some apologized and asked for forgiveness, but not all; in the end, only 850 of the 7,000 amnesty applications were granted. Across the nation, South Africans watched the televised proceedings, witnessing the grief of survivors and regret of perpetrators, and the discussions within the formal proceedings were mirrored in discussions throughout every level of society.

Enabling the spirit of forgiveness was Ubuntu, an ancient southern African belief. Ubuntu holds that individuals exist only in relationship with other living beings: I am because we are. It is our responsibility as relatives to take care of one another.

Might truth and reconciliation, informed by the ideals of Ubuntu, play a role in the United States? Is it time—as Fania Davis proposed in an article for yesmagazine.org—for truth and reconciliation processes to examine and attempt to heal the police violence aimed at black people?

Archbishop Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, claims to be retired at age 83, although he continues to be sought out for his wisdom and counsel. The Rev. Tutu, is an Episcopal priest, the executive director of the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation, and coauthor with her father of The Book of Forgiveness.

Fania Davis and Sarah van Gelder interviewed the father and daughter via email questions; the two answered with an audio recording. To hear the full audio click here. An edited version of the conversation follows.

YES: You speak of the idea of Ubuntu. That concept seems like one that we in the West should understand better. Could you explain what it means?

Desmond Tutu: Ubuntu speaks about how we need each other. God, quite deliberately, has made us beings that are incomplete without the other. No one is self-sufficient.

Mpho Tutu: Ubuntu recognizes in the most profound way that we are interdependent, and that any action that I perpetrate against you has consequences for me and for my life. And so, the golden rule—do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you—is a more Western expression of the concept of Ubuntu. What you do to me lives on in you.

YES: Can you speak of a moment that brought you to your deep appreciation of Ubuntu? And how has Ubuntu informed your work?

Desmond Tutu: One is constantly aware of it, but I think many people would be able to appreciate this instance: People who had been ill-treated, subjugated, instead of seeking revenge, were ready to speak about reconciliation, forgiveness. Of course, they were given a wonderful example by the magnanimity of a Nelson Mandela, who came out of prison not spitting blood and fire, but saying we need to understand the other person and we need to forgive. And our country was saved from devastation by this willingness to understand and to forgive.

"No one is self-sufficient."

And it’s not a one-way thing—the generosity of spirit from one side provokes a response in kind from the other side. People wondered when they saw the caterpillar that had been South Africa—repulsive—turning into a gorgeous, beautiful butterfly.

YES: In the United States, how might we interrupt cycles of historic racial trauma that began with slavery, then morphed into lynching, and then into the racial violence associated with Jim Crow, and today into mass incarceration and deadly policing? Could truth and reconciliation have a role?

Mpho Tutu: For it to work in the United States, there has to either be a willingness for both sides to engage in the process, or there needs to be some sort of carrot and some sort of stick. In South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission offered the carrot of amnesty to perpetrators, and the stick of possible prosecution.

YES: What is the role of truth-telling, and how do we get to reconciliation from truth-telling?

Desmond Tutu: Obviously, if we want a reconciliation, it’s not going to happen if you tell half-truths. That is why here in South Africa, for people to be granted amnesty, it had to be quite clear that they had made a full divulgence, and you had people who were checking the veracity of those who were applying for amnesty.

YES: Reconciliation is often disdained as something that comes from a position of weakness, of making up and letting bygones be bygones, and as surrender and giving in. How do you view reconciliation?

Mpho Tutu: I think that reconciliation is actually a demonstration of strength. It takes incredible courage to go through the process that will lead you to reconciliation—to tell the story, to be able to articulate how you have been injured in ways that may feel excruciatingly painful and shameful. To name the hurt: shame, feeling disdained, feeling belittled or demeaned. And then to be able to grant forgiveness!

"It takes incredible courage to go through the process that will lead you to reconciliation."

You get to tell your own story in your own words and to say that the perpetrator is not the person who describes who you are. Because when somebody injures you, it’s as though they define you. If somebody slaps your face, they then define you as the person whose face can be slapped. When you are able to forgive someone for slapping your face, what you’re then saying is, “No, actually, I’m better than what you say I am. I am not the person whose face can be slapped. I am the person who can say, ‘That doesn’t happen. I’m done with you, or I’m done with being in this kind of a relationship.’”

YES: How do we get to a common understanding of history, especially when the experience of whites and blacks has been so different? Is it even important that we come to a shared understanding?

Mpho Tutu: I think I would call it a shared narrative rather than a common narrative. We’re not telling an identical story. We’re telling the same story from different perspectives.

In the United States, in Richmond, Virginia, there is a statue of an unknown Confederate soldier. Richmond was the transshipment point for slaves—first slaves coming from Africa, and then, once the trans-Atlantic slave trade stopped, it was the place where black slaves were sold down the river to the plantations in the South. And the Richmond slave trail begins at what is now that memorial to the Confederate dead.

The story of slavery and the story of the American Civil War is not only a story of a war that brought an end to slavery, but is also a story of hundreds of thousands of white Southerners whose brothers, fathers, sons died by the thousands and by the tens of thousands. These, too, are people who have a story and a perspective and a passion.

When my son dies, it’s my son who dies. I don’t frame my son’s death in your narrative; I frame my son’s death in my narrative. You frame my son’s death in your narrative.

YES: You talk about the South African Truth and Reconciliation process both revealing “an extraordinary capacity for evil” and “a marvelous magnanimity” on the part of victims. What has that insight led you to believe about human nature?

Desmond Tutu: That we are extraordinary beings! All of us have the capacity for the greatest possible evil. All of us! None of us can predict that under certain circumstances we would not be guilty of the most horrendous atrocities and cruelty. That is why, when they said in the newspapers that someone was a monster, I kept saying, “No. That person carried out monstrous acts.” That person can change.

"We’re not telling an identical story. We’re telling the same story from different perspectives."

And, yes, it taught me that human nature can plumb the worst possible depths, and race has got nothing to do with it. And human nature can also scale the highest heights of nobility, and, again, race is not a determinant factor.

YES: Truth and reconciliation often takes place after a traumatic period is over. Is this process possible in the United States, where racial violence and exclusion continue today?

Mpho Tutu: Yes, it is possible. Truth and reconciliation are processes, and because they’re processes, they’re ongoing. In a place where racism continues or where the harms continue, we can still engage the process. We go as far as we can go. We tell the truth as much as we can tell the truth. We tell our story as much as we can tell our story. We explain as much as we can explain what the impact of the action is on us, and those who are able, forgive. For those who are not able to forgive, they reset and start telling the story over again.

YES: Would a truth and reconciliation process here in the United States differ from the South African process? And if so, how?

Mpho Tutu: Oh, I think that an American process really would have to be homegrown. The South African process isn’t a template. It’s not a one-size-fits-all pattern. In every society and in every situation, you will tailor the process to fit the realities on the ground.

YES: Many well-meaning white Americans welcome the idea of “forgiveness” and are perhaps too eager to close the door on our history of racial trauma. What has to happen before we reach the phase of seeking forgiveness?

Mpho Tutu: We describe in our Book of Forgiving what the process of forgiving is. It begins with telling the story, so you can’t get to forgiveness without confronting the reality of what happened. And you must name the hurt. You can’t get to forgiveness without saying, “This is how I have been injured.”

It is only after you have done those two things that you actually get to forgiveness. So forgiveness isn’t a cheap “OK, everyone, let’s just forgive and forget!” No, you can’t. You have to actually remember in order to be able to forgive.

YES: What is the role of apologies and reparations?

Desmond Tutu: It’s quite amazing how powerful “I’m sorry, please forgive me” can turn out to be when it is genuine.

But the genuineness will be tested, in fact, by whether you are prepared to make up as far as you can. Are you ready to provide material resources that will seek to redress the balance? In the United States, that’s schools, and housing, and work, job—

Mpho Tutu: Job discrimination, redlining—

Desmond Tutu: Yes. Things that actually you can get to work on.

And those who have been hurt must be the ones who have the right to propose what it is that will begin to assuage the anguish, or you’ll just be repeating the same cycle of the perpetrator, who is a top dog, prescribing.

YES: Why do you say, “Without forgiveness we have no future?”

Mpho Tutu: Even the most cursory glance around the world can show you the difference between countries that have engaged in some kind of process of truth-telling, reconciliation, forgiveness, and those that have not.

In places where no effort has been made to forgive, the cycle of violence continues, generation after generation, century after century. In other places, the leaders have decided that it stops here.

"You can’t get to forgiveness without confronting the reality of what happened."

So for instance, Rwanda is not necessarily a shining example of what a country should be, but it is a shining example of what a country can be on the way to being. Having engaged in a reconciliation process and in a truth-telling process, that is a country that is beginning to flourish, as opposed to, say, Syria or Egypt, where the pattern has been retribution that begets retribution yet again.

YES: On a more personal note, I wonder if you can give an example of how truth and reconciliation worked within your family? Was there a time when you as father and daughter had to tell difficult truths within your family and seek reconciliation?

Desmond Tutu: Hmmm!

Mpho Tutu: I think that our family is, unfortunately, not unique. We’re like every other family. We have fights and struggles. We have times when we turn away from each other, and times when we actually have the courage to face each other, and tell our truth, and seek reconciliation. But, no, it’s not easy. We have to work at it, too.

Desmond Tutu: I agree! (Laughs)

YES: You suffered for years under the apartheid system, and you have witnessed terrible atrocities during your travels to places like Rwanda. How do you achieve the inner peace you seem to have?

Desmond Tutu: I am very fortunate because I know that there are many people praying for me, and I am the recipient of the gift of their praying for me.

I laugh easily, but I cry easily, as well. I cry quite a bit.

And I try to bring things to our Lord. During apartheid times, I used to go into the chapel and remonstrate with God, saying, “How can you allow such and such a thing to happen, for goodness sake?”

Mpho Tutu: The benefits of some wonderful spiritual guides. I don’t know which one it was who said, “You can either be a vacuum cleaner or a washing machine.” If you’re a vacuum cleaner, you suck it all up, and you hold it until you explode. If you’re a washing machine, you let it in, and you let it out. You hand it over to God. It’s impossible to carry all the pain, but God can carry it all.

]]>No publisherYTW Feature2015/05/29 00:00:00 GMT-7ArticleHis Ancestors Were Slave Traders and Hers Were Slaves. What They Learned About Healing from a Roadtriphttp://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/make-it-right/healing-historys-wound
We embarked upon a journey to test whether two people could come to grips with deep, traumatic, historic wounds and find healing. We had no idea where we would end up.Sharon’s Story

I burst into tears in the parking lot of the Lowndes County Interpretive Center in rural Alabama. Tom and I were five days into the 6,000-plus mile healing journey that informed "Gather at the Table", the book we wrote about healing the many wounds Americans inherited from the legacy of slavery. We had just crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma where, in March 1965, John Lewis (now a 15-term U.S. congressman) and more than 600 protesters tried to begin a 54-mile march to Montgomery. On a day that came to be known as Bloody Sunday, Alabama state troopers confronted the peaceful marchers and viciously attacked them with billy clubs. I watched these events unfold on television as a 14-year-old child embraced in the warm comfort of my family home in Chicago.

Tom and I had just heard the story recounted in epic detail at the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. As we sat in my Jeep in the parking lot off of U.S. Highway 80, I could not contain my emotion any longer. I gripped the steering wheel and cried like a baby. I was so angry and overwhelmed; what I most wanted was for Tom to get the f*** out of the car.

My great-grandparents were enslaved in Lowndes County, Alabama, which is at the heart of the historic march route. They lived a lifetime of Bloody Sundays. My great-grandmother Rhoda Reeves Leslie was alive when I was a child. I knew her. I loved her. I had no concrete idea, until that very moment in the parking lot, what anguish she and other members of my family had suffered as slaves, and then as people who were terrorized by Jim Crow laws, disenfranchised from voting, and kept from becoming full citizens in the land of the free and the home of the brave. In 1965, there were zero black voters in Lowndes County because of voter suppression through poll taxes and intimidation. Even today, it is deeply impoverished. Toms face morphed into a representation of all white people and everything they had done to people like me.

Photo by Kristin Little.

Tom’s Story

I didn't know what to say. So I said nothing. I sat in the passenger seat next to Sharon while she sobbed. Twenty minutes earlier, on the drive from the Voting Rights Museum, I had asked her, What would you do if you had lived here then?

I would kill them, she said, staring straight ahead as she drove, clutching the steering wheel in a death grip. I watched the first tear roll down her cheek.

I am often accused of being a Kumbaya kind of guy. I believe seriously in love and peace and want everybody to get along. I also believe that people are born with a basic sense of humanity that can enable them to changenot just themselves but the communities in which they live. I know Sharon shares that belief, but it is sometimes hard to keep the faith.

We first met in 2008, through Coming to the Table, a nonprofit organization founded by the descendants of both slaveholders and enslaved people in partnership with the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. [Tom is currently executive director of Coming to the Table.] The founders were inspired by the vision of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his historic March on Washington speech that one day the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveholders will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. The work of Coming to the Table is to acknowledge and heal wounds from racism that are rooted in the United States history of slavery.

We were just lost souls looking for direction and relief.

In 2009, Sharon and I embarked upon a journey to test whether two people- an African American woman from South Side Chicago who is descended from enslaved people, and a white man from central Oregon who is descended from the largest slave-trading dynasty in U.S. history could come to grips with deep, traumatic, historic wounds and find healing. We had no idea where we would end up. We were just lost souls looking for direction and relief.

So there we were, sitting in a car in Alabama, bearing witness to yet another example of the great American trauma that keeps all of us mired in the misery of racism. Grappling with that awareness isn't easy, especially when sitting next to a woman crying her heart out over something I couldn't totally comprehend.

The hard truth is that my face does represent the face of oppression. I'm white. I'm male. I'm heterosexual. I'm able-bodied. I was raised Christian in a middle-class home and community. Until the summer of 2001, when I joined members of the DeWolf family on a mission to retrace the triangle slave-trade route of our ancestors, I was blissfully unaware of my unearned privilege. On that journey I was exposed to horrific truths about the foundations upon which America is built and the systems that continue to benefit people who look like me and discriminate against people who look like Sharon.

In spite of that understanding, what Sharon said did not seem fair. I am not my slave-trading ancestors. I helped expose their sins when we made the PBS/POV documentary "Traces of the Trade" and when I wrote my first book, "Inheriting the Trade".

One great revelation along the way came from Coming to the Table co-founder Will Hairston, who said to me, Guilt is the glue that holds racism together. We build walls with bricks of denial to protect ourselves from feeling it. In the end, guilt is divisive and counterproductive. Instead of the destructive feeling of guilt, what I do feel is profound grief over the enormous damage done. I feel a responsibility to acknowledge and address the consequences of our historical inheritance. That is why I dedicate myself (and encourage other white people to do the same) to using my privilege to expose the truth and make a positive difference.

During the three years after that day in the parking lot, Sharon and I drove thousands more miles and waded ever deeper into the morass of history. Along the way, we laughed, cried, argued, and shared transformative experiences that changed the way we both look at the world. We subsequently participated in STAR trainings (Strategies for Trauma Awareness & Resilience) through CJP to seek ways to make sense of it all. Through STAR, we learned about terrifying social patterns exhibited by deeply traumatized societies and what we can do to heal their effects.

Photo by Kristin Little.

The hidden wound

In 1970, poet, essayist, and environmentalist Wendell Berry published The Hidden Wound, a 137-page essay on race and racism. He wrote: "[Racism] involves an emotional dynamic that has disordered the heart both of the society as a whole and of every person in the society." He said, "I want to know, as fully and exactly as I can, what the wound is and how much I am suffering from it. And I want to be cured; I want to be free of the wound myself, and I do not want to pass it on to my children. I know if I fail to make at least the attempt, I forfeit any right to hope that the world will become better than it is now."

People of color fall on the negative side of virtually all measurable social indicators.

A foundational American belief is that certain people are less than human, singled out for disdain, undeserving of respect, and certainly not entitled to equal representation in the American Dream. The short list of atrocities that define the African American experience shows those beliefs in action: African people were enslaved in all 13 original colonies. Ninety-five percent of all American trans-Atlantic slave-trading originated from northern ports. Rhode Island, home to the DeWolf slave traders, was responsible for 50 percent of it. More than two centuries of brutalization during slavery were followed by 100 years of Jim Crow. Slaves were formally liberated, but African Americans were subjected to the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan, lynching, and other atrocities. Beginning in 1910, in two waves over 60 years, more than 5 million people joined the Great Migration from the South. They sought opportunity in the promised land of the North, but found only a veneer of equality. The Red Summer of 1919, a wave of riots initiated by whites against blacks in both Northern and Southern cities, proved the point.

Today, relative to white people, people of color fall on the negative side of virtually all measurable social indicators. In 2014, the Pew Research Center reported that the median white household was worth $141,900, 12.9 times more than the typical black household, which was worth just $11,000. Poverty rates for African Americans are more than 160 percent higher; unemployment is double. White and black Americans use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates, but African Americans are incarcerated at 10 times the rate of whites for drug offenses. Seventy-six unarmed black people were killed by police from 19992014, includingjust in the last year Michael Brown (Missouri), Eric Garner (New York), and John Crawford (Ohio). According to ProPublicas analysis of federally collected data on fatal police shootings, young black males in recent years were at a far greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts 21 times greater.

Cycles of violence

The STAR program emerged in the aftermath of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks of September 11, 2001. As described in "STAR: The Unfolding Story 2001-2011", the Center for Justice and Peace building at Eastern Mennonite University and Church World Service partnered to create a training program for religious leaders and caregivers working to support traumatized communities. The program evolved into trainings that were useful to anyone working with traumatized individuals and communities. It is grounded in a multidisciplinary framework that integrates neurobiology, psychology, restorative justice, conflict transformation, human security, and spirituality. More than 7,000 people working in more than 60 locations around the world have received STAR training.

No one can just get over traumatic wounds. Thats not how our bodies and brains work.

The illustration below of the Cycles of Violence shows how people typically respond to traumatic wounds. We become caught up in a seemingly infinite loop of victimhood and aggression that is fueled by reenactment. Our conscious and unconscious beliefs about how and why we've been harmed and who caused the harm often result in a desire for retribution. As STAR trainers say, hurt people hurt people. Traumatic wounds result from a variety of sources and impact individuals, families, communities, and societies. These impacts fester in wounds that have never healedlike the legacies of slavery, racism, sexism, and religious intolerance. Trauma affects the well-being of the whole person: body, mind, and spirit.

No one can just get over traumatic wounds. Thats not how our bodies and brains work. If we dont do the work we need to heal, we end up trapped in cycles of violence. But thats not inevitable. The STAR approach offers ways to break the cycles.

Recovering from trauma and building resilience

Without intervention, our thoughts and feelings become beliefs. Our beliefs direct our actions and inform the reality of our everyday lives. If we are stuck in cycles of violence, our thoughts, beliefs, and actions become mired in fear. Breaking cycles of violence and building resiliencerequires fully engaging our brains with the conscious intention of healing.

The actions that lead toward healing and reconciliation center on acknowledging the harm through mourning, confronting our fears, hearing the story of the Other, choosing to forgive, and incorporating principles of restorative justice in ways that proffer dignity for all who have been harmed by stressing responsibility and restitution.

The STAR approach connects personal and community healing with organizational and societal well-being. It rests at the foundation of the Coming to the Table approach to healing the lingering wounds that emanate from the American institution of slavery. The four interrelated activities involved in the Coming to the Table method are:

First: Researching, acknowledging, and sharing personal, family, and societal histories of race with openness and honesty. Truth and reconciliation commissions in countries like South Africa, Brazil, Colombia, and Canada are model attempts to reveal the whole truth of egregious wounds that afflict modern societies. They are typically combined with attempts to implement restorative justice to correct the wrongs.

Breaking cycles of violence and building resilience requires fully engaging our brains with the conscious intention of healing.

Second: Connecting with others within and across racial lines in order to develop deep and accountable relationships. As an example, the original intent of the founders of Coming to the Table was to connect linked descendantspeople who have a joint history in slavery (i.e., descendants of slaves and their slaveholders)with a goal of engaging them in communication with one another and coming to terms with their shared history. In our own case, we are not as directly connected as that, but were able to find a way by making friends on purpose to cross the breach.

Third: Exploring ways to heal together. Support groups help people build meaningful relationships by sharing stories about traumatic experiences and responses. Rituals related to acknowledgement of the past help create connections between past and present in order to understand where harms originated, how they affect us in contemporary times, and how we can move forward to healing.

Fourth: The model challenges us to actively champion systemic change that supports repair and reconciliation between individuals, within families, and throughout society. The persistent inequality between races results from structural systems in which people are treated differently based on difference (race, power, privilege, etc.). From the recent Department of Justice report damning the pervasive, discriminatory policing practices in Ferguson, Missouri, to the persistent disparities between black and white people in wealth, education, health, employment, and housing, the effects are before our eyes if we are willing to see. The greatest challenge is eliminating disparities so that all people are treated equally and without prejudice based on their race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.

There is no particular sequence to these four activities. In the final analysis, all are essential to move forward from trauma to healing. With regard to racism, white people often want to rush toward reconciliation without doing the necessary hard work that is required along the way. We are here to tell you: The road is not easy, but the benefits are enormous.

What you can do today

Racism. Sexism. Religious intolerance. Inequality. Violence. It is easy to feel overwhelmed. What can one person do?

Engage your rational brain. Think about things in different ways. Examine your subconscious beliefs. Act in ways that lead toward positive change. Open your eyes to the injustices around you. Open your heart to see others, not as the Other but as brothers and sisters in the human family. You will find that others who believe as you do will congregate together and build social and political power to change the institutions that presently seem to control our fate. When peoples hearts and minds change, collectives like Coming to the Table can be empowered to bring change to society at large.

In 49 B.C., Julius Caesar stood on the northern bank of the Rubicon River in Italy, leading an army in defiance of the Roman Republic. It was an act of treason. The phrase crossing the Rubicon has survived to refer to any individual or group committing itself irrevocably to a risky or revolutionary course of action. It has come to mean passing the point of no return.

In 1965, John Lewis and more than 600 others crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the Rubicon of their day. We stand on the shore of todays Rubiconthe Rubicon of racism. We have a choice to make. We can choose the difficult task to acknowledge and heal our nations historic, inherited wounds and break free from the Cycles of Violence. Or we can do as our ancestors have done to us: pass the wounds on to our children. How will you choose?

]]>No publisherYTW Feature2015/05/23 00:00:00 GMT-7Article40 Acres and a Mule Would Be at Least $6.4 Trillion Today—What the U.S. Really Owes Black Americahttp://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/make-it-right/infographic-40-acres-and-a-mule-would-be-at-least-64-trillion-today
Slavery made America wealthy, and racist policies since have blocked African American wealth-building. Can we calculate the economic damage?

]]>No publisherThemeYTW Feature2015/05/14 00:00:00 GMT-7ArticleThese Moms Lost Their Kids to Violence. On Mother's Day Weekend, They're Marching on Washington‏http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/these-moms-lost-their-kids-to-violence-on-mothers-day-theyre-marching-on-washington
Maria Hamilton's son Dontre was killed by police officers. After no one was charged, she sought out hundreds of other parents and decided to take their demands to Washington.McKinley Walker and Gwendolyn Omeyse sat together in the Penn North Recovery Center in Baltimore's Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood. This is the neighborhood where Freddie Gray grew up. It’s also where he died three weeks ago while in police custody. The center is a gathering space as well as a resource for community members during tense times.

"We are the ones that lost our children on the street.”

Walker's 30-year-old son was killed in 2007 while waiting for a bus. "He wasn't bothering nobody, he wasn't drug dealing, he wasn't gang-related," Walker said. "He was a hardworking man."

Walker said that for weeks, people have been flooding to Baltimore in the wake of Gray's death. But around here, parents have been losing children for years and are growing frustrated with what they say is negligence on the part of law enforcement when it comes to investigating their children's murders.

“Because we are the ones that lost our children on the street,” added Gwendolyn Omeyse, whose 20-year-old son, Levern, was shot and killed in September 2010.

The recent deaths of African-American men in Baltimore, Ferguson, Missouri, and other cities have brought mothers and fathers to the frontlines of protests and conversations about police violence.

“The voice of mothers is an important voice in creating policy because moms know how those policies play out all the way down to the kitchen table,” says Monifa Bandele of MomsRising, an organization that helps improve community safety and create economic security for mothers. MomsRising is one of many groups led by mothers working toward solutions.

A million moms march

Maria Hamilton is from Milwaukee, but shares many experiences with the mothers and fathers of Baltimore. On May 9, she and her organization, Mothers for Justice United, will be leading an expected 1,000 people in the Million Moms March to the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. There, they will present a list of demands, like reforming the way racially charged homicides are investigated, as well as cases of police misconduct. A group of mothers also met with White House staff on Friday.

At 31 years old, Hamilton’s son Dontre, a diagnosed schizophrenic, was killed in Red Arrow Park by a Milwaukee police officer on April 30 last year. Workers in the area had called the police to make a complaint about him. Two teams of officers responded to the call and determined Dontre was not a threat.

A third officer, Christopher Manney, responded alone and conducted a pat-down that quickly escalated to beating Dontre with a baton. When Dontre tried to grab the baton, Officer Manney shot him 14 times.

Manney has not been charged with any crime. He was, however, fired for conducting a wrongful pat-down. An investigation into whether or not Dontre’s civil rights were violated is in progress.

“I decided that I would take them to Washington, D.C., myself ..."

Two months after Dontre’s death, Hamilton started Mothers for Justice United, which supports moms who have lost children to violence and who have been overlooked by police departments due to race and economic status.

After attending a protest following Mike Brown's shooting in Ferguson last summer, Hamilton went to St. Louis to speak with other mothers who had lost their children but had not seen any police response.

“I decided that I would take them to Washington, D.C., myself to get the DOJ to open up these cases and start an investigation into the police departments,” she said.

“I feel as though there’s a genocide going on."

Not all of the mothers Hamilton spoke with had children who were victims of police violence. Some were killed by others in their communities, or as a result of gang violence. What they all shared, she said, was local authorities who lacked the interest and will to investigate.

“I feel as though there’s a genocide going on," she said. "The system that we live in wasn’t meant for us to actually survive in.”

Another generation

When Marion Gray-Hopkins heard about the Million Moms March, she immediately knew she had to be there. Her son, Gary Hopkins Jr., was murdered in 1999 at the age of 19. He was unarmed, and the coroner determined that he had his arms up when he was shot.

"We could not let another generation grow up in that type of system."

While charges were brought against the officer who killed Gary, the case was dismissed and the officer acquitted.

Bandele said she fears the same may happen in Baltimore: “That was very painful and it made people very determined—we could not let another generation grow up in that type of system."

That’s why Million Moms March is calling for stronger measures for holding officers accountable and nationwide guidelines to control the use of police force. Currently each state makes their own guidelines.

MomsRising is also demanding that the White House and Department of Justice address the implementation of federal laws for the use of force by police, better training for officers, and an external investigator for cases of police misconduct.

Hamilton hopes this weekend's march and meeting with the White House will make public officials take notice.

“I can’t live like this no more,” she said. “I refuse to live in fear… There’s a lot of laws that need to be changed, and it starts with Congress.”

Editor's note: The original version of this story said Freddie Gray was murdered while in police custody. While six police officers have been charged for his death—one of them for murder—the case has not yet gone to trial.

]]>No publisherYTW Feature2015/05/08 00:00:00 GMT-7ArticleAfter Baltimore: It’s Time to Make Things Right‏http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/make-it-right/after-baltimore-its-time-to-make-things-right
From slavery to police brutality, reconciliation begins with the truth‏.Today, Baltimore’s State Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced that six officers from the Baltimore Police Department will be charged for the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray.

“I heard your call for ‘no justice, no peace’,” Mosby said in response to the tens of thousands of protesters who occupied the city’s streets this week.

It seems that in Baltimore, activism paid off. Freddie Gray will not join the long list of black people who die anonymously at the hands of law enforcement. Mosby’s statement demonstrated that killing has consequences—even when the victims are young black men; even when the killers are police officers.

The prosecution is an important step, but only a beginning.

More than 50 years after Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and six years after the inauguration of an African American president, Freddie Gray’s neighborhood is suffering from unemployment rates above 50 percent, and life expectancy is 10 years shorter than the national average. The exclusion and impoverishment of people of color continues, as does state-sponsored violence against them.

So is there hope of taking on racism?

This is what we asked as we developed the upcoming summer issue of YES! Magazine, “Make It Right.”

Noted civil rights leader Fania Davis guided us as we explored this question. Davis believes that restorative justice processes can be used to forge new futures based on transformed relationships, recognition of one another’s humanity, and new social structures. Her restorative justice work—which she practices in the Oakland, California, school system—involves truth-telling encounters, deep dialogue, acknowledging harms, and taking action to make things as right as possible.

That gives us a roadmap. It means we own uncomfortable truths: That this country’s wealth was created by the forced labor of kidnapped Africans using land taken by violence and duplicity from Native peoples. That the trauma continued after emancipation through convict labor, lynching, land grabs, Jim Crow laws, job and housing discrimination, and other practices that excluded African Americans from economic opportunities. Native peoples saw the intentional destruction of their culture and livelihoods, their children taken away to residential schools where they were physically and sexually abused.

The result of this brutality is enormous wealth for some (almost exclusively white people) while others are left impoverished.

Acknowledging this truth is a first step toward reconciliation. Just as important is looking for the many ways injustice continues in our communities, workplaces, relationships, and in the criminal justice system—and working to make it right.

If we want to someday live in the Beloved Community envisioned by Rev. King, it will mean acknowledging the pain and anger, along with the love. It will mean the descendants of slaves and slave traders meet face to face and make peace. It will mean acknowledging that some of our revered universities were founded by men who fostered genocide. It will mean making real change in our police system and in the systems that create poverty, and ending mass incarceration. And it will mean drawing upon the best of our spiritual teachings on healing wounds. If we do that hard, challenging work, day by day—with anger, at times, and with compassion—we can begin to make it right.

]]>No publisherYTW Feature2015/05/01 13:00:00 GMT-7ArticleFood Stamps Are Worth Double at These Michigan Farmers Markets—Helping Families and Local Businesseshttp://www.yesmagazine.org/commonomics/food-stamps-at-farmers-markets
The USDA is putting $31 million behind a program that helps low-income families take home twice the veggies, and local farmers make twice the money.Vicki Zilke is a farmer in Ypsilanti, Mich., population 20,000, where more than a quarter of residents live below the poverty line. Every week, she sells her vegetables at Downtown Ypsilanti Farmers Market, one of two in the city. Nearly 40 percent of the shoppers at both hubs are on some form of food assistance funding from the government.

The two farmers markets first started accepting payment through food assistance programs back in 2006. But that year, they only received $378 from the program.

It’s a way for families on limited incomes to participate in the movement for local production and consumption.

But in 2010, an incentive program called Double Up Food Bucks expanded from Detroit to Ypsilanti. The program matches SNAP money (formerly known as “food stamps”) dollar-for-dollar when people spend it at farmers markets. That means shoppers can double up to $20 in spending on fruits and veggies. By 2014 customers spent more than $39,000 at these markets through initial SNAP dollars combined with Double Up’s supplement.

So instead of a customer base with $20 of SNAP money to spend, farmers like Zilke had a customer base with $40 to spend. “I make more money, I expand my business, and then I can hire more people,” Zilke said. “If I hire more people I then improve the bottom line of my community. It’s a ripple effect.”

That’s why the USDA is providing $31 million in grants to finance organizations around the country that, like Double Up Food Bucks, provide SNAP incentives. The grants were announced March 31 and were authorized under the Food Insecurity Nutrition Incentive Program in last year's Farm Bill. Double Up Food Bucks will receive $5.1 million and will be matched in full by private donations.

“The fact that we now see this national funding program from the USDA is really a testament to the legislative process…” said Oran Hesterman, CEO and president of Fair Food Network, the organization behind Double Up Food Bucks. “It’s a bright spot in the world of sustainable food and healthy food access.”

Photo by Chuk Nowak for Fair Food Network.

Here’s how the program works: People bring their SNAP cards, which function much like a debit card, to the local farmers market. They tell the market manager how much they want to spend—let’s say $5—and then they are given tokens for that amount—plus $5 more in Double Up Bucks. You can get up to $20 doubled, which means customers take home extra food, and farmers earn more revenue. This allows shoppers to stretch their food budgets and include nutritious options they might not otherwise find in their diet.

It also keeps money circulating in the local economy, supporting farmers who, like Zilke, may in turn create jobs. In fact, SNAP sales at Michigan farmers markets went from nearly $300,000 in 2009 to more than $1.2 million in 2013. By working at different levels of the food system—with producers, distributors, and consumers—SNAP incentives approach problems holistically.

Double Up began as a pilot project of the Fair Food Network, a national organization that works to improve accessibility to healthy food. It started in 2009 at Detroit farmers markets and has grown to more than 150 sites statewide. Hesterman said they hoped that by offering SNAP users double their money when they spend it at farmers markets, it would be more affordable for them to eat healthy food and they would be less inclined to buy processed foods.

Hesterman worked on other SNAP incentive programs across the country and saw how effective they were at bringing people to farmers markets. Nationwide, more than 46 million Americans—almost half of them children—currently receive benefits to improve access to food. Finding healthy food can be especially hard for recipients who live in food deserts.

“I make more money, I expand my business, and then I can hire more people. If I hire more people I then improve the bottom line of my community. It’s a ripple effect.”

He said that when the program started, Detroit was one of the worst food deserts in the country, with more than 30 percent of the population receiving food assistance of some kind. There was not a single SNAP incentive program in the state.

But Detroit also has Eastern Market, the largest and oldest continuously functioning farmers market in America. “I saw all these features in place,” Hesterman said. “Really ingredients for what I thought would be a really successful SNAP incentive program.”

While food availability has improved across Detroit, the Double Up program has successfully spread to markets and farms across the state. Hesterman credits this in part to the increasing demand for local food. It’s a way for families on limited incomes to support and participate in the movement for local production and consumption, he said.

Gordie Moeller is a retired social worker and activist. He works in the eight counties around Grand Rapids, Mich., trying to get farmers to transition from cash-only transactions to accepting SNAP benefits, something they don’t usually have the technology for. He was moved to do this when he found out that, of the millions of dollars that come into the area in food assistance, only a small portion goes to farmers and farmers markets. The rest goes mostly to supermarkets.

“I tell them [farmers], Muskegon County gets $63 million a year in food stamps,” Moeller said. “Right now you’re not getting any—it’s all going to Walmart.”

Part of the problem is that farmers aren’t set up to accept SNAP. Another part is that many people don’t know their options.

To spread the word, Moeller goes to food pantries frequented by SNAP users and informs workers and shoppers about the program. He said that when shoppers walk into the food pantry, they often say they would like to eat things like strawberries, but can’t afford them. Pantry workers then inform them they can spend some of their money on fresh food at the farmers market.

Once pantry workers understand the Double Up program, they are able to help SNAP users learn how to get double their money’s worth in food. According to Moeller, the results are worth it. “That’s how we got 49 new families in one week to go to the farmers market,” he said.

Now, with the support of the USDA, Hesterman said he hopes programs like Michigan's can move to more states, and more locations. The next steps for the program include using the grant money to spread awareness and get the Double Up dollars accepted at grocery stores so shoppers can have access to fresh, Michigan-grown food year-round.

“We need solutions that hit on different facets of an issue at the same time,” he said. “This kind of incentive does that.”

]]>No publishercommonomicsYTW Feature2015/04/22 00:00:00 GMT-7ArticleA Trade Rule that Makes It Illegal to Favor Local Business? Newest Leak Shows TPP Would Do That And Morehttp://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/trade-rule-illegal-favor-local-business-tpp-leak-wikileaks
The leaked text is full of dense legal jargon. But a close reading makes its corporate agenda crystal clear. Secret negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade and investment agreement involving 12 nations of the Pacific Rim, are coming to a close, and President Barack Obama will soon submit the final agreement to the U.S. Congress for approval.

But a newly leaked document belies those claims. The Trans-Pacific Partnership’s text consists of a number of chapters, among the most important of which is the one on investments. On March 25, WikiLeaks released a confidential draft of that chapter dated January 20. The draft contains instructions indicating that it will be declassified only “Four years from entry into force … or, if no agreement enters into force, four years from the close of the negotiations.”

A quick reading of the leaked chapter makes it clear why TPP sponsors have gone to great lengths to keep their negotiations secret. The document substantiates claims by opponents that the TPP is a corporate-rights agreement designed to facilitate the export of U.S. jobs, allow corporations to sue governments for enacting labor and environmental protections, make it illegal for governments to favor local businesses, and advance the colonization of national economies by global corporations and financiers.

As problematic as this chapter is, we can be thankful that it is out in the open. Now the need is to understand what all the legalese means.

The leaked document includes many technical details decipherable only by trade lawyers. Here are the Cliffs Notes in simple English.

1. Favoring local ownership is prohibited

Let’s start with the Investment Chapter’s section on how the TPP’s member countries should treat foreign investors:

Each Party [country] shall accord to investors of another Party treatment no less favorable than that it accords, in like circumstances, to its own investors with respect to the establishment, acquisition, expansion, management, conduct, operation, and sale or other disposition of investments in its territory.

Put in plain English, the above paragraph means that signatory countries renounce their right to favor the domestic ownership and control of the lands, waters, and other productive assets and services essential to the lives and well-being of their people.

The 12 countries further renounce their right to favor locally owned businesses, corporations, cooperatives, or public enterprises devoted to serving their people with good local jobs, products, and services. They must instead give equal or better treatment to global corporations that come only to extract profits.

2. Corporations must be paid to stop polluting

Another provision limits what member countries can do in regard to corporate investments:

No Party may expropriate or nationalize a covered investment either directly or indirectly through measures equivalent to expropriation or nationalization (“expropriation”), except: (a) for a public purpose; (b) in a nondiscriminatory manner; (c) on payment of prompt, adequate, and effective compensation [emphasis added] … ; and (d) in accordance with due process of law.

This provision may sound reasonable, until you look at the chapter’s definition of “investment,” which includes “the expectation of gain or profit.” This odd definition means that a corporation can sue a signatory nation if the country deprives the corporation of expected profits by enacting laws that prohibit the company from selling harmful products, damaging the environment, or exploiting workers. Other language in the chapter makes it clear that this applies to actions at all levels of government.

In other words, a country in the TPP has every right to stop a foreign corporation from harming its people and the environment—but only if the country compensates the corporation for the expense of not harming them.

Foreign firms have won more than $360 million in taxpayer dollars thus far in investor-state cases brought under NAFTA. Of the 11 claims currently pending under NAFTA, demanding a total of more than $12.4 billion, all relate to environmental, energy, land use, financial, public health and transportation policies—not traditional trade issues.

3. Three lawyers will decide who’s right in secret tribunals

The leaked chapter also describes how disagreements will be settled:

Unless the disputing parties otherwise agree, the tribunal shall comprise three arbitrators, one arbitrator appointed by each of the disputing parties and the third, who shall be the presiding arbitrator, appointed by agreement of the disputing parties.

The arbitrators are private lawyers who are not accountable to any electorate. They are empowered by the TPP to order unlimited public compensation to aggrieved investors. The proceedings and the identities of the tribunal members are secret, and the resulting decisions are not subject to review by any national judicial system.

According to TheNew York Times, NAFTA tribunals, on which the ones in the TPP are modeled, even have the power to overturn judgments of national courts—including the U.S. Supreme Court. John D. Echeverria, a law professor at Georgetown University, has called this method of dispute settlement “the biggest threat to United States judicial independence that no one has heard of and even fewer people understand.”

4. Speculative money must remain free

Yet another provision prohibits restrictions on movement of money from one country to another:

Each Party shall permit all transfers relating to a covered investment to be made freely and without delay into and out of its territory. …

Forms an investment may take include: (a) an enterprise; (b) shares, stock, and other forms of equity participation in an enterprise; (c) bonds, debentures, other debt instruments, and loans; (d) futures, options, and other derivatives.

Thus, the TPP guarantees the right of speculators to destabilize national economies through the manipulation of exchange rates and financial markets, without interference from national governments.

In so doing, the TPP strips national governments of the right to limit speculation in favor of investment in strong, stable, and productive national economies.

5. Corporate interests come before national ones

Another passage assures that corporations need bear no obligation to serve the interest of the people who live in the countries where they do business:

No Party may ... impose or enforce any requirement or enforce any commitment or undertaking: (a) to export a given level or percentage of goods or services; (b) to achieve a given level or percentage of domestic content; (c) to purchase, use or accord a preference to goods produced in its territory, or to purchase goods from persons in its territory.

The article continues on with six additional provisions, which together prohibit governments from requiring that a foreign investor be under any obligation to serve the host country’s people or national interest.

The 12 countries would renounce their right to favor locally owned businesses

Obama administration officials say these provisions are needed to level the playing field for American companies doing business abroad. This raises an important question: What is an American company?

The Institute for Policy Studies reports that U.S. corporations and their subsidiaries currently hold $2.1 trillion in profits offshore to avoid paying taxes to the government of the United States. These include highly profitable companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, General Electric, Exxon Mobil, and Chevron. One wonders on what basis we should consider these globe-spanning, tax-dodging, job-exporting corporations to be American.

Approval of the TPP means sacrificing our democracy and our right to manage our markets and resources for the public good. And for what gain? To secure rights for corporations—which claim an American identity only when convenient—to exploit the peoples and resources of other countries that have signed the same nefarious agreement.